It began as a casual discussion among college friends, but soon got the gears in Kaila Factolerin’s head turning: What would it be like to have no kids?
Back in 2011, Philippine society was abuzz with the seemingly unending debate on the passage of the Reproductive Health Law, then a bill, which would guarantee citizens’ access to birth control and maternal health care. On the sprawling, palm-speckled campus of the University of the Philippines Los Baños, Ms. Factolerin and her peers were growing more and more frustrated. If the government refused to support their reproductive health, they’d swear off having kids entirely – something that seemed outlandish at the time.
“We were defiant! We really thought we’re going against the grain, against what was expected of us,” says the writer from southern Luzon.
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Amid economic and political instability at home and abroad, a growing number of young women in the Philippines are breaking social taboos and making the decision to not have children.
Fast-forward to 2025. She and her friends are among a growing number of Filipino women choosing to live child-free, according to recent research from the Journal of Family Issues, which shows a dramatic upward trend in voluntarily childless individuals.
“If I am to be really honest, I want kids. I want a family,” says Ms. Factolerin. Although the Philippines has made progress on reproductive health, she says that economic and political instability at home and abroad has made her firm in her decision not to have children.
In a country that prizes motherhood, this choice comes with challenges, including social stigma, but increasingly, women are willing to risk raised eyebrows or familial rejection to not become mothers. Individual reasons vary – from economic anxiety to a desire for freedom to simply not seeing the appeal of motherhood – but looking across the Philippines, sociologists see this as a shift toward greater agency.
Diana Therese Veloso, associate professor in sociology and behavioral sciences at De La Salle University in Manila, and a child-free individual herself, says this uptick is “a welcome change.”
“This is a sign that women are not locked into the traditional roles and responsibilities that were imposed on them for centuries, like the beliefs that they have to prioritize being a wife and a mother,” says Dr. Veloso. “I actually see it as a sign that people are making conscious decisions about what they want to do.”
Shifting values in the Philippines
Philippine society places great importance on childbearing, say researchers Anthony Luis B. Chua, Jennifer Watling Neal, and Zachary P. Neal in their 2025 study on the prevalence of child-free women in the Philippines from 1993 to 2022. In an interview, Dr. Zachary Neal says that the same can be said for almost every country. “There’s an expectation that people will want children; there’s an expectation that people will have children,” he says.
But the researchers found that this attitude toward parenthood has been changing, particularly among Filipinas who are single, older, live in an urban area, and have a lower level of education.
This shift seems to be reflected in the decline in the average number of children Filipino women will have over their lifetime, from 2.7 in 2017 to 1.9 in 2022. The dip is “the sharpest ever recorded,” according to the Philippine Commission on Population and Development. “Fur parenting,” or choosing to take care of pets instead of raising kids, is also on the rise in the country.
Overall, Dr. Veloso says that Filipinos are shifting toward a more inclusive view of family life and parenting. Still, taboos remain.
The Philippines Constitution recognizes “the Filipino family as the foundation of the nation,” and the family unit is central to Filipino culture; traditionally, great deference is shown not only to immediate family, but also to grandparents and a vast extended network of relatives. This helps explain why some women may still feel obliged to have children out of a sense of filial piety. And because abortion is illegal in the predominantly Catholic Philippines, an unwanted pregnancy can leave women with limited options.
These factors pushed one blogger from metro Manila to seek out permanent contraception – around 1,500 miles away in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
An IT worker by trade, she asked to go only by her Reddit username Baffosbestfriend. While she has shared details of her experience on a personal blog and on the r/childfree subreddit – a message board for “those who do not have and do not ever want children” – she has not told her family about the operation out of concern for her father’s mental health.
“Ever since I was young, I already knew that, unless motherhood is something I really like doing, I would work hard to make sure it doesn’t happen to me,” she says. Living through her two sisters’ pregnancies cemented her decision to undergo a surgical procedure that removed both fallopian tubes in August 2024.
She remembers her first meal after surgery – a simple Thai porridge called khao tom and a carton of soy milk – as one of the best of her life. It was “the glorious taste of no children,” she says.
Creating space for the child-free life
For Ms. Factolerin, the writer who first considered living child-free in college, the decision looked different.
Having a family “has always been like a desire for me,” she says, but the state of the world has made her give up on that dream, at least for now. She worries about economic insecurity, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the family of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos returning to power in the Philippines. She also points to ongoing wars across the world as evidence of global instability.
Until things change, she will remain childless by choice, and has welcomed a puspin – a short-haired Filipino cat – named Magic into her home.
“If the definition of a child is less of a ‘young human,’ but more of ‘someone I can love on and care for and occasionally loves me back,’ then Magic is my foster child,” she says.
She also devotes her energy to supporting other women to build a life that is not centered around kids – a goal shared by Dr. Neal and fellow researchers.
As more women break from the expectations of motherhood, Dr. Neal hopes their research will help “to acknowledge their existence and create space for them in society, right alongside people who do choose to have children.”
